BAGHDAD (AP) – The immolation of a Jordanian pilot by the Islamic State group has brought a unified outcry Friday from top religious clerics across the Muslim world – including a prominent jihadi preacher – who insisted the militants have gone too far.
Abu Mohammed al-Maqdesi, considered a spiritual mentor for many al-Qaida militants, said the killing of Lt. Muath al-Kaseasbeh is “not acceptable in any religion.” He spoke in an interview with Jordan’s Roya TV a day after being released from more than three months in detention.
At Friday prayers in neighboring Iraq, where the militant group has seized territory in a third of the country, top Shiite cleric Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani declared in a sermon that the “savage” act demonstrates the extremists know no boundaries and violate “Islamic values and humanity.”
Religious groups, often at odds with one another over ideologies or politics, are increasingly speaking out in unison against the militants, who continue to enforce their rule in Iraq and Syria through massacres, kidnapping, forced marriages, stonings and other acts of brutality.
Iranian Shiite cleric Ayatollah Mohammad Emami Kashani claimed in his sermon that militant groups like the Islamic State are created by Western nations as a means for promoting “an ugly picture of Islam.”